Yes, We Do Have Concentration Camps

T

he scene outside the U.S. Border Patrol station where lawyers reported that detained migrant children had been held under bad conditions in Clint, Texas, on June 26, 2019.

 

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Shaun King 
June 29, 2019
The Intercept

“YES, WE DO have concentration camps,” began the stinging critique of the Trump administration’s immigration detention facilities. It was written earlier this week by the editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune, in the reliably conservative state of Utah.

Andrea Pitzer, author of the definitive book on the global history of concentration camps, agrees. So do people who were once forced to live in another era’s concentration camps.

But amid the debate about what to call immigration detention facilities, few people have disputed the truly terrible conditions that exist within them. Migrants have long reported awful experiences in immigration custody, but in recent months, an increase in the number of people, especially families and children, crossing the border and being detained has led to severe overcrowding.


Dr. Dolly Lucio Sevier was granted access to a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, and wrote in her report about it that “the conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities.” They “felt worse than jail.” The kids she examined were forced to endure “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.”

It’s not an accident. These systems are cruel by design.

Public Outrage Moved Children Out of Clint Texas Facility

You and I did it !

By Caitlin Dickerson  NYTimes
June 24, 2019

Following a public outcry, hundreds of migrant children have been transferred out of a filthy Border Patrol station in Texas where they were detained for weeks without access to soap, clean clothes or adequate food, the authorities confirmed on Monday.

Some of the children were transferred into a shelter system maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services, while others were sent to a temporary tent facility in El Paso, according to Elizabeth Lopez-Sandoval, a spokeswoman for Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who began looking into the overcrowded facility in Clint, Tex., last week after reports about the conditions there.

The move came days after a group of lawyers was given access to the station in Clint and said they saw children as young as 8 years old caring for infants, toddlers with no diapers, and children who said they were waking up at night because they were hungry. After they arrived on June 17 and observed the conditions, the lawyers immediately began lobbying for the children to be released.

The Border Patrol had been routing children to Clint because the agency was facing an unusually large influx of border crossers and had insufficient space to house them during the normal 72-hour processing period at the border. The infants there had either been separated from adult family members with whom they had crossed the border or were the children of teenage mothers who were also detained there. Some of the minors had been detained there for nearly a month.

[Read about the children held in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions.]

The lawyers who visited the facility, first interviewed by The Associated Press and later by The New York Times, said that children lacked access to private bathrooms, soap, toothbrushes or toothpaste. Many were wearing the same dirty clothes that they had crossed the border in weeks earlier.

Widespread overcrowding in Border Patrol facilities has been documented recently in reports by the agency’s inspector general, but journalists and lawyers have been given little access to fenced-off facilities.

Some sick children had been quarantined in Clint, and the lawyers who traveled there were allowed to speak to those children by phone, but not in person.

Ms. Lopez-Sandoval said that only 30 children remain in Clint. The Border Patrol station there was meant to be temporary; children are supposed to be transferred out after 72 hours. But many had been languishing there because the Department of Health and Human Services’ shelters were full.

Trump- Children held in dangerous conditions.

See  more posts on dangerous overcrowding of children in detention.  2 posts down. 

CHARLES M. BLOW . NYT.

I have often wondered why good people of good conscience don’t respond to things like slavery or the Holocaust or human rights abuse.

Maybe they simply became numb to the horrific way we now rarely think about or discuss the men still being held at Guantánamo Bay without charge or trial, and who may as well die there.

Maybe people grow weary of wrestling with their anger and helplessness, and shunt the thought to the back of their minds and try to simply go on with life, dealing with spouses and children, making dinner and making beds.

I believe that we will one day reflect on this period in American history where migrant children are being separated from their parents, some having been kept in cages, and think to ourselves: How did this happen?

Why were we not in the streets every day demanding an end to this atrocity? How did we just go on with our lives, disgusted but not distracted?

Thousands of migrant children have now been separated from their parents.

As NBC News reported in May:

“At least seven children are known to have died in immigration custody since last year, after almost a decade in which no child reportedly died while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

Homeland Security’s own inspector general has described egregious conditions at detention facilities.

And, last week, an attorney for the Trump administration argued before an incredulous panel of judges on the Ninth Circuit that toothbrushes, soap and appropriate sleeping arrangements were not necessary for the government to meet its requirement to keep migrant children in “safe and sanitary” conditions.

As one of the judges asked the attorney:

“Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you do something other than what I described: Cold all night long. Lights on all night long. Sleep on the concrete floor and you get an aluminum blanket?”

Stop and think about that. Not only do these children in question not have beds, they are not even turning off the lights so that they can go to sleep. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, plain and simple.

How is this happening? Why is this happening?

An Associated Press report last week discussed the descriptions by lawyers of “inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens” at a Texas border patrol station.

According to the report:

“A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago.”

The report explained at another point:

“Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the 2-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and had no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him.”

The report described at another point:

“A 14-year-old girl from Guatemala said she had been holding two little girls in her lap. ‘I need comfort, too. I am bigger than they are, but I am a child, too,’ she said.”

Trump Orders Military - Prepare Concentration Camps for Immigrants

Actual concentration camps are in the process of development at military bases across the Southern United States. This isn’t the first time in US history that facilities are being constructed and used to imprison large numbers of a persecuted minority in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities (the definition of a concentration camp). Previous examples of this are now infamous, such as the so-called Japanese internment camps. We're now on the brink of adding a new chapter to this dark history.

Potential locations have been identified by military or Pentagon personnel as:

Congressman Mc Clintock

• Tornillo Port of Entry, Texas – capacity 360 teenagers CURRENTLY ACTIVE
• Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas – capacity 45,000
• Fort Bliss, Texas
• Dyess Air Force Base, Texas
• Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas – capacity 20,000
• Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Air Station, California – capacity 47,000
• Navy Outlying Field Wolf and Silverhill, Alabama – capacity 25,000
• Yuma Marine Corps Air Station, Arizona
• Concord Naval Weapons Station, California – capacity 47,000 CANCELLED
• 
  

Military officials, in response to pressured deadlines from the White House, have stated that these camps can begin to be operational by mid-August. Estimates are that capacity for another 10,000 people can be added each month. The White House’s stated timeline of 45 days out from June 27th has local base commanders scrambling and caught unaware.